In Perfect Light

  He checks his luggage into a locker, then walks a few blocks south and crosses the Santa Fe Bridge into Juárez. There are no border guards to stop him. It is not the first time he has been to Juárez. He has good memories from previous visits. He still remembers that boy, that perfect boy, perfect as the morning light.

  He smiles to himself.

  By early afternoon, having found some release, he will cross back into El Paso. He will walk into the office of his parole officer and tell him he is ready to start a new life.

  Grace and Morning Mass

  Breasts were odd and strange, when you stopped to think about them. Sam had loved to touch them, kiss them, smell them. Her son had nursed on them for nearly a year—they were useful then. Since she was a girl, she had noticed the way young men stared at women, stared at their breasts, became obsessed with them. She smiled to herself. What do I need them for at fifty? And, anyway, I’ve been trying to lose some weight. Isn’t that what she’d told the doctor? He’d humored her by laughing at her joke. “Gallows humor,” he’d said.

  She knew her body. She didn’t need a test result, didn’t even need to feel bad to know that there was something wrong. It was like stepping outside and smelling the first cool wind of September, knowing that the season was changing, despite the fact that summer seemed like it might go on forever.

  Even a tree knew when it was time to drop its leaves. Even a tree in El Paso.

  It was odd—just then—that she should get the urge to have a cigarette. She swore she could smell a cigarette burning in the room. She took in a deep breath and smiled. She’d only smoked a few years, but she’d enjoyed the habit. She’d felt free and young and even sexy when she’d smoked. She’d never felt that way, sexy, like men might want her. Sam had always laughed. He’d showed her a mirror and said, “God, Grace, don’t you see? Can’t you see what the whole world sees?”

  “Why would I want to see what everyone else sees, Sam?”

  “How can a woman who looks like you not understand?”

  “Understand what?”

  “You don’t have an ounce of vanity in you, Grace. That’s your problem.”

  “I happen to think that the world would be a lot better off if we really looked at what people were instead of what they looked like.”

  “Are you telling me you don’t care what people look like?”

  “I just happened to have married a very handsome man.”

  “Oh?”

  “You see, Sam? I’m as vain and shallow as everyone else.”

  She could almost hear him laughing. He always laughed. You’re too sincere, Grace, that’s your real fault. He’d been wrong about that. She was more cynical about the world, and more realistic about its corruption, than Sam could ever fathom. It was he who had been sincere.

  What would happen if she drove to the store and bought a pack? What would happen? What was so wrong with that? She played the message on the machine over again, the doctor’s voice, tentative. Grace? Richard here. Listen, I have the results of your tests sitting here on my desk. Why don’t you call me in the morning. Maybe you can come in. We’ll talk. He was trying to sound casual, matter of fact, Oh this is nothing. Not to worry. Most doctors were notoriously good liars—a disease they picked up in medical school. But not this one. As luck or fate would have it—though she believed in neither—her doctor went to morning mass every day. She’d seen him more than once, kneeling in the back, his head bowed in prayer. He almost looked like a boy just out of confession, bowing his head and uttering the prayers the priest had given him for his penance, Oh my God, I am heartily sorry. But he wasn’t a boy, he was a forty-something-year-old doctor who was atoning for something he’d done in his past, repenting for sins committed in the name of success or pleasure or sheer selfishness, or he used daily mass as his one moment of quiet in an otherwise too-busy, too-loud, too-fragmented and chaotic day, or he was punishing himself for having a life, a good life, a very good life he just couldn’t believe he deserved, a guilt that could not be unwritten by God himself. Of course, the possibility existed that he was the real thing, a person of faith, a true believer.

  In any case, he was a good man, and if she were going to have a doctor at her side, it might as well be a doctor who wouldn’t hide the truth. She didn’t want or need the false comfort of doctors who made a virtue of sparing their patients’ feelings—lying not only to their patients but to themselves because it was easier, the path of least resistance. She wouldn’t let anyone play her that way because she was too smart and had grown up too poor and had fought an eternal war with idiots who mistook poverty for lack of ambition instead of for what it was—the accident of birth. She wouldn’t let anyone play her that way because she was a beautiful woman who had learned not to rely on the shallow fact of her beauty, because she understood clearly that her beauty, like her poverty, was also nothing more than a mere accident of birth. She would not let anyone play her that way because she had worked too hard to be honest, honest not in the eyes of God, who had no eyes, not in the eyes of her friends and colleagues, not in the eyes of her son, Mister, not in the eyes of anyone but herself, the harshest, the severest of judges. She’d had too many clients, hundreds of them, clients who were too good at escaping everything with the lies they told themselves. Houdinis, most of them, with their lies. Magicians. But how could they not lie to themselves when that was all that they’d ever been taught? Did you chastise students for learning their lessons? But she, Grace Alarcon Delgado, had learned other lessons. She had lived her life trying to look straight at things, straight at them knowing that there would come a day when she would look at something so hard that it would look right back and break her. Well, wasn’t she made of flesh and bone? Wasn’t she made to break? Sure. Wasn’t she a woman?

  She took one last look at her breasts as she stood before the mirror. There was nothing wrong, to look at them. There was a certain beauty in the surface of things. She understood the seduction. She put her bra back on and buttoned up her blouse. Well, if they have to cut—and then suddenly she wondered what they did with all those cancerous breasts. Did they throw them away in some nearby surgical trashcan? Did they save them, freeze them, put them in some chemical to preserve them so that future medical students and doctors and surgeons could pull them off some shelf and study them as if they were library books? Would they check them out, take them home, keep them for a couple of days, then check them back in? And after they had served their purpose, were they burned along with all the other surgical materials? Shouldn’t they be buried somewhere—all those breasts—buried deep on some piece of holy ground? Hadn’t they been good once? Hadn’t they given life to thousands, to millions? Even dogs were buried or disposed of with more ceremony and respect. God, Grace, stop. Stop it.

  She closed her eyes. She imagined herself smoking a cigarette. She imagined taking in the smoke, then letting it out, all her anger dissipating in the afternoon light. She inhaled, exhaled, Sam lighting her cigarette, inhaled, exhaled, Sam’s hand brushing against her breast, inhaled, exhaled. There, there, Grace, all better. She opened her eyes.

  She had to hurry. She would be late for morning mass.

  Yesterday, you teased us. Do not tease the thirsty—give us rain. After she prayed for rain to end the drought, she prayed for Mister, though she could feel her anger as she whispered his name. She prayed for Irma down the street who’d lost her boy. She prayed for her body, her breasts, her heart. Make me bear whatever comes. Sam had been good at whatever comes.

  She closed her eyes, and when she opened them she found herself staring at the stained-glass window—Jesus walking on stormy waters. “I’m not like you, so give me arms to swim.” She took a breath. “And Jesus, Jesus, bring us rain.”

  The First Signs of a Storm

  According to the report, they found the sheets of papers in his shirt pocket—folded and neatly filed. According to the report, he’d fought like a demon to keep those sheets of neatly folded papers. According
to the report, he’d spit and clawed and cussed and kicked. At one-thirty in the morning. On the southeast end of downtown. In an alley. Behind ¡Viva Villa! a bar on San Antonio Street. A bar not far from the courthouse. Not far from the county jail. Which was where he was taken. Which was where he was booked. For being drunk and disorderly. For resisting arrest. For spitting and clawing and cussing and kicking. All this, according to the report.

  Grace had learned to be suspicious of reports, just as she knew others were suspicious of her own conclusions—also written out in that peculiar genre they called reports. She had decided long ago that reports existed to create the illusion of order. That was what made them readable. That was also what made them fiction.

  She was doing it again. Questioning herself. Deconstructing her profession. Always, she did that when a new and difficult case made its way to her desk. And there it was, another one of those cases. Right there. On her desk. Out of habit, she beat her chest with mea culpas. That’s how mass began, with mea culpas, Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy. Beat your chest, Por mi culpa. Embrace your limitations, Por mi culpa. Exorcise your paralysis. Por mi gran culpa. Take Communion, Amen, then go out to the world and do your job.

  As she ran her hand over the sheets of paper, she tried to picture a young man trying to hold off four police officers with the sheer power of his rage. She ran the scene over in her head, the young man, drunk, sitting in an alley, reading his own writing in the dim light of the streets, and then suddenly, the lights of a police car shining on his face, the officers asking him questions What are you doing there? What are you doing? and him refusing to act like a deer about to be run down, refusing even to acknowledge their accusing presence What’s that you’re reading? and him folding the sheets of paper, slowly, carefully, and filing them back in the shirt pocket and them asking him again What’s that you have? and him saying finally The fucking Communist Manifesto, and the now-angry cops insisting to see what he’d been reading, as if the act of reading were some kind of goddamned felony—and anyway he was sitting in an alleyway, drunk, and that was reason enough, and hadn’t he defied them?

  That man, that angry young man, he was lucky he hadn’t been killed. The possibility existed that he’d wanted exactly that—to be shot and killed and finally fall silent and at peace because his days brought him anything but calm and he was so fucking tired of trying to make sense of a life that made no sense at all.

  She made a mental note to herself, then shook her head as she stared at the man’s handwriting. She didn’t approve of the way the police and the judge had so easily placed his confiscated writings in the file they forwarded to her. When they took you, you were theirs, your clothes, your wallet, your belt, your cigarettes, the few dollars you carried in your front pocket, your keys, all you had—which was nothing anyway—it was all theirs now. That’s what happened when they had you. And so the system had made her the inheritor of what had once belonged to someone else. The papers—his papers—now hers. An interesting progression. All legal and good, good for the young man who’d carried them, and good for the society that was protecting him, though it wasn’t at all clear how he had harmed anyone except the policemen who had tried to take him by force. But it was all to the good, sure, now she could help him. And these pieces of paper, they would help her to help him. Him who needed help. So there they were—his words written on the sheets of paper, the creases still there. She kept running her hands over them, sheet by sheet, trying to smooth them out, her ironing hands as useless as the roots of a dead tree. You could never uncrease a piece of paper once it had been folded. Not ever.

  She shook her head. Not a good business, this thing of having another man’s writings in your hands. Not a good business at all. But like it or not, he was her client. So there was nothing left to do except to read the words that had not imagined her as an audience.

  Love is a storm that twists and mangles us. If you love—if you really love—if you have that kind of heart—then you know.

  (And if you don’t, there is no explaining.)

  The storm comes from within.

  There is nothing you can do to prepare.

  Hardly the words of a criminal. Hardly the words of a lunatic, either. Except that lunatics often wrote well. They did. She’d seen it time and time again. Lunatics could write. They had that in common with pompous poets. On the second sheet of paper—though she had no idea if she were reading the pages in the correct order—she read and reread another passage on the same topic.

  Remember this: Nothing is as simple as a storm. Ask anyone.

  They will tell you—those who know about storms—to get out of its path. If you can. If you have time. They will tell you nothing can stop a storm. Save yourself. Run. But there is no running. Laugh at yourself for thinking of escape.

  Remember this: Nothing can destroy a storm except itself. It must hurt and blow and wail till it dies. You will not be alive to clean up the debris. All the light will be gone.

  She was almost envious—not simply because of his obvious discipline, but because of the physical fact of his writing. Clean, legible, delicate. She was not used to seeing that kind of beauty in her line of work. Damage—now that was a word she was used to. That’s what she was used to seeing. And she was used to describing that damage even if she did not believe that a damaged human being could be translated into words.

  She looked at the handwriting again. This man, whoever he was, knew something about control, knew that control could kill, but also knew control could save a life. This man, he knew something about beauty.

  On the third sheet of folded paper, he had continued writing on the same theme. But something had changed—not in the tone, but in the writing. Perhaps he had been drinking. Perhaps he had been tired. Perhaps he’d written the third page at a completely different time in a completely different place. The actual writing had begun to fall apart. He had stopped drawing one letter at a time. On the first two sheets of paper, the words seemed to matter as much as the message he was trying to convey. But, now, he let himself be drunk in the message. That kind of drunkenness had a different kind of beauty altogether.

  I know a man and a woman. They had that kind of heart. A heart so pure it was nothing but storm. In the end, how could they have been anything else except misshapen and deformed and grotesque? Who would have guessed that they were beautiful? At least in the beginning. God, they were Beautiful. Their skin glowed in the light. I think their hearts glowed, too. Who would have guessed? But they were born with that kind of heart, so how could it have been otherwise?

  I hated watching them as they loved their way through life—though no one called it that. Not even the people who should have known better. They misnamed it other things. And goddamnit, it was all so obvious. Goddamnit! Goddamnit! Goddamnit! Why do people fucking do that? Why do they always overlook the obvious? All the fucking time!

  No one knew them.

  And even me who did know them. I—I hated being loved by them. But I couldn’t run. I couldn’t. It is useless to run from a storm. So I stayed. I know about storms as well as anyone.

  So what am I going to do with this mangled fucking heart? It isn’t good for anything, not anymore. If my body was a computer screen, I would delete the file marked “heart.”

  She couldn’t help but wonder what had taken him there, to that alley behind that bar. She often wondered about her clients. She cared more for some of her cases. She was like a bad mother who played favorites. She was going to care about this one—that much she knew already. She always knew from the start. Not that caring changed anything. She had learned that what mattered most was not how much she cared, but how much the client cared. Some of them had been worn down to nothing long before they reached her office.

  She almost didn’t notice the phone was ringing. She always lost one of her other senses when her mind was engaged. Sometimes it was her sense of smell—but usually it was her hearing. She slowly reached for the phone. “Grace Delgado,” s
he whispered, her greeting dry and distant.

  “Grace, you busy?” Mister. He’d had a deep voice since he was a boy. He never called, but when he did, he called her at her office. Never called at home anymore—as if their relationship were purely business.

  “Mister?”

  “How are you, Grace?”

  “The same.”

  “Are you with a client?”

  “No.”

  “I saw you last week. I honked. You seemed distracted.”

  “I might have been.”

  “You were walking out of Dr. Garza’s office. Is anything wrong?”

  “No. Just a checkup.”

  “You sure?”

  “For someone who never calls, why the sudden interest in your mother’s health?”

  “I’m trying to be civil, Grace.”

  “You’re good at being civil.”

  “But not so good at being a good son.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “What is it, Mister?”

  “Why don’t we have a drink after work?”

  She could almost see him biting his lip or pulling on his untamable hair. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can tell me now.”

  “I’d like to see you.”

  Just then he sounded sincere. Like Sam. That was the thing about Mister—he was so much like his father. So why did she find it so difficult to love him? “Sounds serious.”

  “It is.”

  “Are you getting a divorce?”